Kitchen Nightmares: Celeb Chefs' Most Memorable Mistakes

Julia Child was no stranger to dropping the occasional raw chicken or letting her flambé turn into serious flames. These days, celebrity chefs convey confidence, not calamity. But we suspect that can't always be the case. We asked a few star chefs to tell us about their most memorable cooking foibles and, well, we discovered they actually are human after all.

Giada De Laurentiis

Most Memorable Mistake: "Oh, we never make mistakes. You mean when I burn things or break dishes? One day, Food Network will put our bloopers at the end of our TV shows and you'll never think the same of us again!"

Emeril Lagasse

Most Memorable Mistake: "It was at a potluck dinner at a very high altitude and we got dessert. I thought it would be nice to do a pineapple upside-down cake. I don't know if it was the wine, but I totally forgot about this thing called altitude. The cake actually blew up inside the oven  just the pineapple was lying in the pan. They had bananas in the pantry and I had bought some great ice cream from a local creamery. I ended up making bananas foster and it was a great recovery."

Lee Anne Wong

Chef: Lee Anne Wong, Chef and TV Personality

Most Memorable Mistake: "It was my first job at Aquavit and I had run out of garnish for the foie gras ganache so the chef de cuisine asked me to come up with something else. We had a case of live Atlantic sea urchin. I didn't know much about sea urchin then. In a moment of creative idiocy I quipped, 'How 'bout sea urchin sorbet?' I'd found it absurd, but the chef said, "Make it happen." I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to make sea urchin ice cream taste good. I'll never forget when the entire kitchen tried it before service. A Japanese staffer was so offended; I still crack up when I think about his expression after his first (and only) bite."

Wolfgang Puck

Most Memorable Mistake: "One year, I had Jennifer Naylor, my chef at Granita in Malibu, make Thanksgiving dinner for us. She made a beautiful turkey with all the trimmings. At home, I put it in my oven to keep it warm. I didn't have my glasses on, and instead of putting the oven on 'bake,' I put it on 'broil.' I was having Champagne in the dining room and started to smell something burning. When I opened the oven, out came a completely blackened turkey, with lots of billowing smoke. I covered it with a tablecloth so that no one would see it, ripped off the burnt skin, and sliced the turkey without skin on it. To my delight, my friends said it was the best turkey they ever ate. 'It has such a wonderful smoky flavor!' The disaster turned into something good."

Michelle Bernstein

Most Memorable Mistake: "I once worked for Chef Jean-Louis Palladin. He was an incredibly intense  a tall, guttural Frenchman and a legendary perfectionist. I was a young punk but a hard worker, and Chef asked that I join him to cook at the James Beard House  a real honor. Dinner is under way and it's controlled chaos in the kitchen. I'm put on fish fry duty. Soon after, Palladin starts screaming: "Michelle, what #@%^&*% fish did you fry?" I had fried the fish he was going to poach and he was left to poach the fish we were going to fry, which was an oily fish that really didn't work for poaching. I was kicked out of the kitchen, but luckily he didn't fire me."

Spike Mendelsohn

Most Memorable Mistake: "I was cooking at Gerard Boyer's restaurant Les Crayères in Reims, France. I was told to make half the amount of soufflé mix because the head chef knew it wasn't going to be a busy night. I thought he was wrong and went ahead and made the full amount. At the end of the night, we had more than half the amount left. The head chef was so upset that I wasted all the ingredients and was so furious that a sous chef did not listen to him that he took the soufflé mix and poured it over my head and told me I had to clean up the entire kitchen that night. Since then, I've listened to head chefs...kinda."

John Besh

Most Memorable Mistake: "You would think opening my fifth restaurant that we would have it down pat. It was opening day at Domenica this past September and while cleaning the stove, a cook moved the stove and put the flame right under the sprinkler system. Getting ready for our first lunch service, we turned on the stove top to start preparing and the sprinkler system went off in the kitchen. It would not stop and flooded the entire back of the house. I was so happy it did not set off the sprinklers in the front, drenching the diners."

Missy Robbins

Most Memorable Mistake: "It was back around 1998. I was doing this big off-premise dinner for 150 people. I was a youngster and it was kinda a big deal since I was working for chefs Anne Rosenzweig and Wayne Nish. I had to macerate grapefruit with coriander and sugar. In the kitchens I worked in previously, salt was always in boxes, I never expected it to be in a bin. So I macerated the grapefruit in the salt. I was able to make it taste a little better, but first thing chef Nish said was, 'This tastes a little salty.' Believe me, anytime I'm reaching for sugar or salt, I taste it."

Sam Talbot

Most Memorable Mistake: "It was opening weekend at the Surf Lodge and I hadn't cooked in a proper restaurant for two years. It was my baby. There were all these celebs in the room and all of a sudden — everything went. The Salamander. The oven. The fryer. I looked at the guy with the grill: Nothing. I realized, 'Oh my God. The gas needs to be filled!' So a friend calls his friend to get a gas tank for us. It's a 400-pound. tank and we can't lift it. We had this old Swiss army transport vehicle called a Pinzgauer. And we used driftwood and loaded it into the Pinzgauer. Then we flew back to the Surf Lodge, wheel the thing through the parking lot and through the crowd, and finally get it hooked up. The entire process was probably 50 minutes and no one skipped a beat. It was the craziest night in my life."

Cat Cora

Most Memorable Mistake: "Several years ago I was shooting a show in someone's house for a surprise chef segment on local TV in the San Francisco Bay area. I would go into people's homes, surprise them at 5 p.m., and cook three or four courses from whatever was in their pantry, all in under an hour. Ironically, this was way before Iron Chef America. When I was roasting a chicken, the oven caught on fire. We extinguished the whole oven and, well, dinner was over."

Jacques Torres

Most Memorable Mistake: "There is a high society in Nice, France, and when they do any party they all want to top each other. So I'm doing a wedding cake that is over 10 feet tall. My assistant came and looked at the door of the salon and looked at the cake and said, 'Jacques, the cake isn't going to make the door.' I ran to the pastry shop and got the ruler and, no, the cake isn't going to make it. If it won't make the door you slide the cake off the table, carry it by hand, roll the table in, then roll the cake into the room, but most maître d's want a big entrance. So, the maître d' comes and I tell him I have a date and I have to go. I laugh all the way home. The next morning the maître d' is waiting for me in front of the shop. 'Jacques, I never was so embarrassed. We couldn't get it through the door!' The customer was laughing, though, and at the end of the day, they were happy."

Chuck Hughes

Most Memorable Mistake: "This hasn't happened in a while, but when I first started cooking, well, you're not the best with your knife. And when you're cooking for 300-400 people a night, things happen. I was so in the juice and I cut myself. Normally you put on a Band-Aid and a rubber finger glove, but I just put a Band-Aid on quickly. I was going about my thing, then all of a sudden: I had made seven salads, and realized I didn't have my Band-Aid on! I was yelling, 'Oh my God! Bring the salads back!' It was a garnish right on top!"

John Shields

Most Memorable Mistake: "I was prepping for New Year's Eve at Charlie Trotter's and they were serving lamb confit. There was limited stove space in the kitchen so I went to an annex kitchen next door (called the studio) to let the confit simmer in the oven. It was supposed to be slowly simmered. Needless to say, I totally forgot about the lamb and ended up boiling it for seven hours in its fat. I was a dead man. But we wound up spending New Year's Day eating lamb jerky."

Jonathon Sawyer

Most Memorable Mistake: "I still have vivid memories of when I worked with chef Charlie Palmer at Kitchen 22. I was making squash risotto and we used a Parisian melon baller to remove the seeds and core. I see Charlie toss a five-dollar bill in the garbage. And then another. So I asked, 'Charlie, why are you doing that?' And he said, 'Well, you're throwing away all my money, I may as well throw it out myself.' In the restaurant, we used as much of the product as we could. I should've been saving the core for something else. He was a great person to work for. I really lucked out."